XtrTech's Web Servers

What sets us apart from other web hosts? Our connection.

We are online with Frontier Global Center® via their OC12 fiber optic cable.  FGC is a Tier 1 provider  which also provides Internet bandwidth to Yahoo®, Netscape®, and Ebay®.  FGC has a 13,000 mile fiber optic network which provides an enormous 460 giga-bytes per second (Gbps) of capacity. We have a direct Internet connection between our router and FGC's router which brings their incredible resources directly to our servers and to your web site.

We are also connected to Qwest® Communication's OC12 line which provides us with redundancy and increased routes to Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Industry analysts claim that telecom circuit failure is to blame for nearly 70% of all server downtime over 10 hours.  Because of our unique   Internet connection, we do not need to connect to the Internet via a telecom circuit as most of our competitors do.  Instead, we have independent cables which run from  our NOC directly to the FGC and Qwest points of presence.  No matter what our client's bandwidth needs are, we have the scalability to meet them.

In early October 1999, we added connectivity from Level 3  Communications®.  Level 3 was described in USA Today as "a dream team with a dream network." With the fundamental change in communication technology at hand, they are the first to build an international end to end communications network, based entirely on IP technology. To implement this new technology, Level 3 plans to construct local networks in 50 cities across the United States, all interconnected by an intercity or long distance network that will extend nearly 16,000 miles.

Yahoo! also connects directly using Frontier GlobalCenter. If you can reach Yahoo!, you can reach our network. Frontier GlobalCenter's ground-breaking 460 Gbps network runs Border Gateway Protocol to 25 other major carriers through over 25 high-speed private peering arrangements, providing the fastest, most efficient and most reliable network available today.

Some web providers operate an additional dial-up Internet service which slows down their connection to the Internet. We are not Internet Access providers - our scalable bandwidth lines are entirely dedicated to web hosting!

All the drives, motherboards, and power supplies in our NOC are in cases with a positive pressure filtered-air environment. Two large fans pull filtered air into the protective case, and the components within are cooled by fans which circulate this purified air. The constant introduction of clean air into the case creates a positive pressure environment ensuring that dust and particles remain out.

The drives and drive bays of our servers are all constructed from high-grade aluminum, and rest in a Shock Mounted Drive Cage, which adds to the durability of the hardware. We back up our servers nightly. If the industrial grade drive were to fail, all we would have to do is copy the backup (never more than 24 hours old) onto a standby machine which is already on-line. The site would be up and running within a matter of minutes.

Each server has dual-redundant hot swap power supplies. If one of these power supplies were to fail, the server would not go down because each power supply is capable of running the server by itself, indefinitely. Meanwhile, alarms would alert our technicians to the problem; they would restore redundancy with one of our spares and then service the failed supply unit. During all this, sites on our network would never be down.

We keep spares on-line of all CPU configurations. If the server were to experience a hardware failure we would literally turn a key, grab the handle on the drive, pull it out, and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We would reboot the second machine and the server would be up and running again in a matter of minutes.

Server Hardware/Software

450 MHz Pentium III Processors
512 MB Ram
9.5 Gig SCSI Hard Drive
Cisco 7200 Router
100 Base T Ethernet Connection
Apache 1.3
RedHat Linux 5.0